This Window: Close It

in which are found tricks of the trade concerning clojure authorship

I didn’t know about Elpa mode. It’s awesome.

Library workers fired for colluding to keep graphic novel from being checked out by 11-year old girl

Yet more fun from M.A.C.C.s. Sharon Cook is having trouble reconciling her faith with what she thinks about while she masturbates, and wants to save other people from that fate.

Jon Ronson on telling his son the worst swearword in the world | Life and style | The Guardian

25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users

via Andy Jeffries

therealadam:

San Francisco Terror Map. For your edification, the hotel I’m currently at is right between “utter human misery” and “Jim Morrisson in the midst of fevers”. Pretty accurate.

53 Southern Heights (via Troy Holden)

I’ve really come to appreciate and enjoy Troy’s photography.

blackandwtf:

Thanks, Alec.

Holy crap, look at that dude in yellow-face on the right. Given the dude on the left’s poor makeup job, I suspect that asianman’s eyes are taped.

“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.”

Microsoft’s new vision | Home Computing | Features by PCR

Really? We’re just gonna admit it now?

marco:

The new Magic Mouse, left, replacing my huge, awesome, but flaky MX Revolution.

I didn’t want to like this mouse.

Apple’s previous mice haven’t quite agreed with me. The Mighty Mouse, and the ball-less, no-button wonder before it, seemed to put form over function in the worst, Steve-Jobs-glass-laptop-screen way.

The MX Revolution after a year

Logitech’s premium mice follow the opposite design paradigm: make a big honking thing full of buttons and wheels with 13 different functions. The MX Revolution is a great mouse for many reasons, but the real revolution was the weighty, flywheel-like scroll wheel that moves in the normal notchy, incremental way unless you flick it quickly, at which point it unlocks from notchy mode and free-spins until stopped. This is an amazingly useful and intuitive function when scrolling through very long content, like a long web page, large documents, or an iPhoto library.

But it comes with a cost. Setting the auto-unlock wheel mode requires the Logitech software, which screws with the standard OS X pointer sensitivity and scrolling acceleration. To get mine to work the way it should, I had to install Logitech’s software to enable the auto-unlock wheel, uninstall it, and install SteerMouse instead to enable most other functionality.

In addition to the software complexity, a more fatal flaw with the MX Revolution at my work computer drives me crazy: at least once per day, the mouse becomes unresponsive for a few seconds, then reactivates at factory defaults with no auto-unlock wheel and no button mappings. These features only reactivate if I unplug and replug its USB receiver, a procedure that I’ve now become quite good at performing. I had a warranty replacement sent from Logitech, but it has other strange issues and a completely different-feeling and less-precise scroll wheel, so I don’t use it. In addition, the MX Revolution in my home setup has started suffering from quirky behavior.

With three different MX Revolutions flaking out in three different ways, I was ready for a change. But the auto-unlock wheel is so helpful in my everyday tasks that I didn’t want to give it up.

The Magic Mouse

Fortunately, Apple provided an alternative with the Magic Mouse. Inertia scrolling, optional but enabled by default, makes the scrolling continue slightly after you stop the scrolling gesture, similar to scrolling views on the iPhone.

I tried a Magic Mouse and was very impressed, so I took the risk and bought one. So far, only two days in, I love it. Inertia scrolling is intuitive and well-executed, and I can use it just like I used the MX Revolution’s auto-unlocking wheel: flick quickly to scroll a lot, tap to stop.

It’s tiny, which seems like it would be an issue with comfort or ergonomics. So far, it hasn’t been.

Beyond scrolling, I haven’t used any of the touch gestures yet. I suspect that attempting to do them on a mouse, which is likely to move itself and your pointer while you perform each gesture, is less convenient than performing them on a bigger, flatter, stationary trackpad. (I don’t use the non-scrolling gestures on the laptop trackpads, either.)

It still has the inconvenient behavior of Apple’s recent mice that requires you to lift your left finger off of the mouse in order to right-click. This hasn’t been a huge problem for me, although I have accidentally sent a left-click event when I intended a right-click a few times.

Time will tell how reliable it is. It seems solid so far, but it’s only been two days.

And it provides huge advantages in simplicity: no software, no USB dongle, no charging cradle, no buttons, no wheels. With just one big surface on top and two thin low-friction rails to make contact with the desk on the bottom, it’s even easy to clean.

So far, it’s surprisingly good, and I’m finally going to unplug and pack away my tragically flaky MX Revolutions.

I had exactly the same mouse before, and it had exactly the same problems. I’ve got the new magic mouse, and I feel almost exactly the same way. I don’t mind simplifying my pointer’s portfolio if it comes with a boost in reliability and the loss of those atrociously small Logitech USB dongles.

blackandwtf

The Rule of Least Power

therealadam:

The bottom line: use simple languages to represent data. The rest of this seems to be obsessed with dogging on Turing completeness and implicitly noting the halting problem. They also seem to want people to think that Haskell and XSLT are equivalent. Close, but not quite.